Saturday, October 20, 2007

“"From my own experience - this could get me in trouble - I think every single school district in the nation has at least one perpetrator. At least one," says Mary Jo McGrath, a California lawyer who has spent 30 years investigating abuse and misconduct in schools. "It doesn't matter if it's urban or rural or suburban."”

That is the most shocking statement from the entire article, in my opinion.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Feeling down?Would you consider yourself depressed?Research suggests that you should get a full-time job!

“The 7% figure isn’t news so much as the fact that if you don’t hold down a full-time job, that figure nearly doubles, to 12.7%. That is, 12.7% of people who don’t hold a full time job in the U.S. have reported an episode of depression from 2004 to 2006.”

You ever have one of “those ideas” which, later, someone else is able to make come to fruition?It happens to me all the time, and is one of the more frustrating things about my existence.

Years ago, while serving on active duty as an Air Security Officer I came up with the notion of how to win the lottery or predict the weather.They both could be manifest of the same theory.I hypothesized that an algorithm—or series thereof—could be devised with which to emulate the behavior of certain complex systems with discrete outcomes, eventually “catching up” with the behavior of the system and then outpacing it.Once the algorithm learned the dynamics of the system it could not only tell you what it was doing at this instant, but also it could predict what it would do.

This system could be applied to the lottery and meteorology, I speculated at the time.It’s been years since that thought had occurred to me, but when I read this article I realized that this had boundless opportunities in other fields.

In the post-September 11TH world we are faced with terrorists and unstable regions of the world that rival similar parts of history during the Cold War, but even more savage.The implications of a set of algorithms which could “predict the unpredictable” could revolutionize many, many areas of the world in which we live.